Mushahid terms proposed US law ‘recipe for a New Cold War’

ISLAMABAD: Senator Mushahid Hussain, Chairman, Senate Defence Committee, while giving his keynote address at seminar on the China-specific ‘The Strategic Competition Act: Implications for China and the region’ currently under debate in the US Congress, termed it as a new form of political and economic discrimination directed against China and friends of China the world over. He called it ‘a recipe for a New Cold War’ which would destabilise the global order.

Citing clauses of the proposed Act, Senator Mushahid Hussain termed its assumptions flawed and false, stemming from a zero-sum-game mindset. He said the Act is tantamount to an intrusion into not China’s internal affairs but also in foreign relations of other countries that have long-standing ties to China. He likened The Strategic Competition Act to the racist ‘China Exclusion Act’ of 1881, which the US Congress passed to disallow visitors from China in the 19th Century, but the Strategic Competition Act, in the 21st Century, is also discriminatory on political, economic and educational grounds. He also termed the formation of proposed ‘Countering Chinese Influence Fund’ under proposed Strategic Competition Act, which would provide $300 million annually for media propaganda and disinformation campaigns directed against China, as well as the Belt & Road Initiative of which CPEC is the flagship project.

Such a bill puts the US on the wrong side of history as the US cannot sustain such confrontation in the political and economic context of a shifting global power balance. Such a narrow legislation goes against globalisation and the international trend of connectivity and cooperation, which rejects confrontation and conflict, which is what the Strategic Competition Act is all about.